


Their Guardian Angel

by Britpacker



Category: New Avengers (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Episode Related, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 03:49:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15721389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Britpacker/pseuds/Britpacker
Summary: Following their evening at the health farm, Purdey and Steed are a touch tender around the conscience. Gambit may not be entirely thrilled by this development...





	Their Guardian Angel

**Author's Note:**

> My first stab at a New Avengers fic (you know the ropes, they're not mine and I'm playing for pleasure, not profit). I loved the show as a young girl in the 1970s and I still love it now. However…
> 
> The final moments of Angels of Death really irk me, and watching a recent TV rerun reminded me exactly how much. I’d like to think that the morning after might have gone something like this… Slight hints of Purdey/Gambit going on toward the end.

She arrived before nine despite their late finish at the health farm, driven less by a desire to file the relevant paperwork than a prickling sense of discomfort at the back of her neck. She bypassed the cluttered off-duty lounge without stopping for what was laughably referred to as _refreshment_ , her dainty lavender heels clip-clopping down the silent lengths of Ministry corridor at a pace designed to deter all but the most determined pursuer. She didn’t stop until she reached the large, oak-panelled room formally designated the domain of one J. Steed, Esq.

She didn’t bother to knock, pushing the door aside with the confidence of a woman assured of her welcome. The two chairs opposite the great man’s were sufficiently established to have left distinct dents in the moss-coloured carpet’s thick pile (only noticeable on the rare occasions the cleaning staff exerted themselves so far as to vacuum thoroughly) by now, and into the nearest Purdey slipped, nodding a greeting to the office’s sole official occupant. “You’re up early,” she commented.

Steed laid aside his pen with a smile that, while affable, lacked somewhat of its usual spark. “I’m not the only one,” he returned kindly, shrewd grey eyes scanning her features and detecting, she gathered, a similar strain in them. “Are you all right?”

“A little tender,” Purdey admitted, folding her hands on the one bare patch of mahogany available on “their” side of the oversized desk. Steed’s broad brow creased.

“The traction…” he began worriedly. Purdey grimaced. 

“My ligaments and tendons are fine, thank you,” she assured him, watching his features change under comprehension’s slow dawn. “My conscience, on the other hand…”

“Yes, I’m feeling rather sore in that area myself,” he confessed, with what, if this hadn’t been the fabled John Steed, she might have considered a schoolboy’s mulish embarrassment. “I do feel I rather disgraced myself last night.”

“ _We_ disgraced _our_ selves,” Purdey corrected firmly. “As I keep telling you, we’re liberated now. You mustn’t feel it necessary to take the blame for a lady’s misbehaviour.”

Briefly she saw a glimmer of mirth. “I’ll remember that,” he drawled, sombre again before she could finish laughing. 

“He saved our lives,” she stated.

“Hardly for the first time.”

“He was wounded.”

“Again, not an uncommon experience.”

“And we ignored him.”

“Didn’t even say _thank you_.”

“Steed.” Biting her lip, Purdey leaned forward, pushing half his accumulated paperwork aside. “How could we have been so…”

“Crass? Insensitive?” he supplied gloomily. She nodded.

“And the rest. If I were him, I’d be…”

“Gambit!”

“Steed, that’s not funny,” she hissed, just as an unmistakable shadow, long and lean, fell across the desk. Holding his left arm stiffly, the strapping around his elbow visibly padding out the sleeve of his immaculately-cut suit jacket, Mike Gambit leaned against the doorjamb, regarding his grim-faced partners with an air of good-humoured bemusement that, paradoxically, only made Purdey feel worse.

“Mike!” she exclaimed, almost knocking over both their chairs in her haste. “How are you feeling?” she demanded, aware of Steed rounding the desk more slowly to join them as she gripped his right hand. “Has Kendrick had a look at your arm?”

“More than a look, which is why it’s three times more painful now than it was last night,” he joked, black brows lifting at the sight of Steed pulling back his usual chair for Purdey to guide him, clucking like the mother hen she so often accused him of being, toward. “He mentioned giving you the all-clear, Steed: so presumably we’re safe to keep playing noughts and crosses in long meetings.”

They both laughed far harder than the quip deserved. “Are you feeling all right?” he asked warily, leaning back in his seat as Purdey perched on the edge of hers, a few inches closer than usual. The girl nodded, much too vigorously.

“Of course. Why shouldn’t we be?”

“Health farms,” he shot back, as if it were obvious. “I thought they were supposed to be all massages and relaxation therapies, not mazes, drugs and traction machines.”

“One mustn’t judge a book by its cover, Gambit,” Steed chided mildly. The younger man frowned, two small grooves cutting down between his knitted brows.

“You really don’t seem yourself, John,” he said, kindly. “D’ you want a cup of tea? Coffee? I could do with one myself after having Kendrick poking about.”

“I’ll go.” Purdey rocketed to her feet, steadying herself with a hand on his shoulder. He flinched. “Gambit, I’m sorry! That’s your bad arm, isn’t it?”

“The bullet only nicked me,” he said reassuringly. “No transfusion this time.”

Two faces fell. “Not funny?” he asked the senior agent, appreciatively watching Purdey’s flared skirt whip up above her knees as she scurried away. Steed managed a watery grin.

“Rather below your usual standard,” he replied, suddenly fascinated by the document half-written before him. “I’ll have Catherine come in later. For you to dictate your report,” he added in the face of his associate’s frank bewilderment.

“I _am_ right-handed, you know,” Gambit told him, lifting the aforementioned limb just in time for a smooth Styrofoam cup to be planted within its grasp. “Thanks,” he added, wincing at the splash of tea over the rim of its twin, which Purdey set down a touch too violently before their boss. “If you’re both being so efficient I’d better get on with it, hadn’t I?”

“There’s no rush,” Steed promised, and now even he recoiled from the expansive bonhomie. “I doubt the Top Brass are in any hurry to be told how comprehensively Coldstream has been playing them.”

“ _Nobody_ could have suspected _him_ ,” Purdey marvelled, and Gambit felt himself relax, long legs stretching out as she shook her head, unaffected and at ease for the first time since he’d arrived. “I even called him, when I couldn’t raise either of you, to tell him about the health farm. I _told_ him I was going to check it out!”

“In that case – thanks for getting him out before I could break into his office,” Gambit told her drily. “The secretary was easier to disarm,” he added, unrepentant. Steed gave her a rueful smile.

“You see my dear, someone suspected the unimpeachably reliable Mister Coldstream,” he murmured. Gambit shrugged.

Then winced as the movement rippled painfully down to his injured joint. “Stood to reason the sleeper was above suspicion,” he said simply, steeling himself for a deep swig of his usual departmental poison. “Thanks for remembering the sugar,” he added. “I don’t usually, but this stuff…”

“I do fear for your digestive tract, Mike,” Steed chided, the informality jarring even more, given their location, than his neighbour’s nervous titter. “But I could always improve it with a touch of this?”

“Not on top of Kendrick’s painkiller, thanks.” The hip flask hovered halfway over the desk, and Purdey had to fight the urge to snatch it for herself. “How is he, by the way? Coldstream?”

“As well as one can expect, with your bullet in his shoulder.”

This time he tried shrugging with one arm, leaving his partners to flinch needlessly on his behalf. “Shoot to kill as a last resort: to save a partner, bystander or in self-defence,” Gambit parroted easily. “Anyway, I wanted him alive in case that nurse wasn’t trained in off switches”

“Good thinking,” Purdey commented. Steed cleared his throat.

“First-class. On more than one level,” he said solemnly. Gambit grinned.

“If something looks too good to be true, it usually is,” he quoted. Purdey bit her lip.

“Not always,” she said softly, catching the senior agent’s eye.

“Indeed,” he murmured. “Sometimes, gold _is_ entirely pure.”

Two pairs of eyes turned his way, and under their intensity even Mike Gambit found himself beginning to fidget, the discomfort in his gut a thoroughgoing distraction from the stinging sensation down one arm. “I, ah, should probably call in at the armoury,” he announced, heaving himself upright before Purdey could move to stop him. “Running low on bullets,” he added, forestalling the offer already tripping down her tongue. 

“Oh.” Every operative had to sign for their own ammo: no exceptions permitted. She subsided back into her chair, but he felt her narrowed eyes following his every step to the doorway. “See you later, then.”

“Oh, you can count on that, Purdey-girl.” With a wink for her and a quick grin to their titular host Gambit loped out into the corridor, his footsteps fading into the Ministry’s enveloping silence.

“I think,” she commented, twisting back to face him. “We may _actually_ have managed to embarrass him.”

“We certainly didn’t make the poor chap any more comfortable, whatever our intention,” Steed conceded ruefully. “But don’t worry: Gambit’s as shrewd as they come. He’ll understand.”

“Thus sparing us the awkwardness of a proper apology?” It wasn’t his fault, but the tension had drained out of the room the moment he left it. Purdey felt her shoulders sag and knew a brief stab of unsporting resentment that Steed, no less sensitive to the emotional undertones, was so much better able to conceal it. “I still feel awful,” she admitted.

“So do I.” Cool crystalline eyes assessed her, leaving Purdey with the uncomfortable impression of being a bug beneath a particularly powerful microscope. “You know, there’s a very old saying that’s particularly apt in our line of work: life’s too short.”

“Steed…”

He raised a peremptory hand, and the warning died on her tongue. “Even at my great age, my dear, I know it to be true,” he continued, and now the ladybug was firmly pinned to a card beneath the lens. “But when one lives with regret, it can seem positively interminable.”

Crossing her long legs, Purdey forced herself to hold his compassionate gaze. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she muttered. Steed’s mouth twitched for an instant.

“Do you not?” he challenged. “Don’t hide behind a crumbling old wall until you have nothing but regret for company, Purdey. It’s a most uncomfortable way to live.”

The sadness in his voice twisted her heart, and deliberately she took a defiant, flirtatious tone guaranteed to make him smile. “Is that the voice of experience?” she wondered. He very nearly sighed.

“A gentleman never tells.”

“And if you _were_ a gentleman, I wouldn’t be asking,” They rose in unison, she swaying around the corner of the desk to drop a daughterly kiss against his crinkled cheek. “I _am_ sorry, Steed. And I _will_ try.”

“Where Purdey tries, she usually succeeds,” he told her affectionately. “You might be interested to know who first said that.”

Two pairs of eyes turned to the door, as if by raw force of will they could make him materialise again. “I can guess,” she said, confidence rushing through her bloodstream and leaving her more than a little light-headed. “Don’t tell him I said this, but…”

“Gambit was right,” Steed finished, sparing her the trouble. “And as you know, my dear, he very often is.”

Her eye fell on the report lying incomplete on the desk. “Yes,” she murmured, far fonder than she would have dared to be, Steed gathered, in the gentleman’s own presence. “Fortunately for us, he is!”


End file.
